In this paper we provide a quantitative examination of initiatives for post-Uruguay Round liberalization in ‘traditional’ GATT/WTO market access areas, as a counterpoint to the recent policy literature on newer issues such as the environment, competition policy, and labour standards. We...

This paper surveys the literature on trade in services, focusing on the policies that are used to restrict such trade, the gains from liberalization, and the institutional mechanisms that have been adopted in the pursuit of liberalization. It argues that technological progress and international...

We assess the impact of U.S. trade policy uncertainty (TPU) toward China in a tractable general equilibrium framework with heterogeneous firms. We show that increased TPU reduces investment in export entry and technology upgrading, which in turn reduces trade flows and real income for consumers....

This paper assesses existing multilateral rules on government procurement from a developing country perspective. It summarizes the economics of discriminatory procurement and investigates to what extent data on procurement reported by members of the WTO Government Procurement Agreement (GPA)...

The National Treatment clause (NT) is the first-line defence in the GATT (and in most other trade agreements) against opportunistic exploitation of the inevitable incompleteness of the agreement. This paper examines the role of NT as it applies to internal taxation under the GATT. It is shown...

We propose a model of trade agreements in which contracting is costly, and as a consequence the optimal agreement may be incomplete. In spite of its simplicity, the model yields rich predictions on the structure of the optimal trade agreement and how this depends on the fundamentals of the...

A firm's productivity depends on how production is organized given the level of demand for its product. To capture this mechanism, we develop a theory of an economy where firms with heterogeneous demands use labor and knowledge to produce. Entrepreneurs decide the number of layers of management...

Many new exporters give up exporting very shortly, despite substantial entry costs; others shoot up foreign sales and expand to new destinations. We develop a model based on experimentation to rationalize these and other dynamic patterns of exporting firms. We posit that individual export...

We examine the qualitative and quantitative predictions of a heterogeneous firm model à la Melitz (2003) in the context of the Canada - US Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) of 1989. We calibrate our model to the pre-trade liberalization stage, simulate the trade liberalization, and compute the...

When trade costs are of the iceberg type (Samuelson 1952) and markups are independent of trade costs, relative prices across markets are distorted, but relative prices within markets are not. When trade costs depart from the analytically convenient iceberg type, distortion will also occur within...